Sublime

In 1660, Britain’s greatest minds, following the path set by Bacon, launched a new Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and in 1666, King Louis XIV of France launched the French Academy of Sciences, creating important new institutions to promote the new scientific outlook. Europe’s universities and scientific academies offered a

After years of patient work around the globe, volcanologists and climate modelers are now sure: in the years 536 and 539/540, there occurred at least two volcanic eruptions of almost unprecedented magnitude. The first of them may have been somewhere in the tropics, although the location has not yet been pinned down conclusively. The second was at L

On May 22, 1963, Tom Hornbein, a thirty-two-year-old doctor from Missouri, and Willi Unsoeld, thirty-six, a professor of theology from Oregon, reached the summit of Everest via the peak’s daunting West Ridge, previously unclimbed.

The Personal Narrative, to give one example, included a long, detailed discussion of a future ship canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific somewhere on the Central American isthmus—the first such study ever presented in print. Humboldt, during his travels, had never set foot anywhere on the isthmus, and this he plainly acknowledged, but he was ta

Whereas Plato distrusted sense experience, his pupil launched a programme of empirical investigation into the natural world – into zoology, botany and meteorology.

Alexander von Humboldt, introduced the notion of Wissenschaft, which connotes the all-round development of the individual and the need to cultivate the whole personality rather than just the mind. The purpose of the university, Humboldt insisted, should therefore be to ‘lay open the whole body of knowledge and expound both the principles and founda

They had attained the top of the world, they thought. For Humboldt it was a supreme, indescribable moment. Nearly thirty years later, in 1828, when the surpassing magnitude of the Himalayas, long a subject of much conjecture, was verified by the first reliable instrument surveys, Humboldt was noticeably stunned. To a friend he wrote, “All my life I